An Investigation Into The Lexical Inferencing In Science And Technology Articles

Lexical inferencing is a tactic of dealing with unknown words which met inthe process of reading. A good lexical inferencing is very helpful in helpingreaders save time and improve their reading speed. The English science andtechnology article is a higher frequency item for college students in science andengineering courses in order to get worldwide information in their scientific fields.The present study presents the findings of a study on examining the process oflexical inferencing for college students in science and engineering courses whilereading English science and technology articles. Specifically, the present studyaddresses four questions (1) How do college learners deal with unknown wordswhen reading science and technology articles?(2)What is the relationshipbetween lexical inferencing and text-related factors when reading science andtechnology articles?(3)How do learner-related factors affect lexical inferencing inscience and technology articles?(4)What is the relationship between the difficultyof words and the scores in lexical inferencing test in science and technologyarticles?The design of this thesis is exploratory and descriptive. Participants of thisstudy were100university freshmen in science and engineering courses．The testhas been given in the end of their second semester, given they had finished theCET-4test in the second semester, and the preparation of this test may help themto improve their English ability. Different kinds of English science andtechnology articles had been chosen as reading materials and only one readingpassage was selected, two from National Geographic and two others from VOA.The participants were firstly asked to read the reading article and then infer themeanings of unknown words. In the end, they were required to indicate thedegree of difficulty and finish all the questions related to the reading material.There are two groups of factors tested in the study including learners’ language proficiency and topic familiarity, which are learner-related factors, andthe Reading Comprehension Test (RCT) and a5-point topic familiarity scale hadbeen used to measure them. Two other text-related factors are contextual supportand morphological transparency and the Contextual Support Scale and theMorphological Transparency Scale were used as the measurement instruments.The analytical tool was SPSS16.0. More specifically, to find out the relationshipbetween learners’ L2proficiency and lexical inferencing, Pearson Correlationwas conducted．Topic familiarity was a within-subject variable, so one-wayANOVA was performed in determining the impact of topic familiarity on lexicalinferencing. The statistical method，One-way ANOVA was chosen to find out themain effects and relationship between them. The results of the study show thatthere is a significant relationship between lexical inferencing success andlearner-related factors. However, on the two text-related factors, only themorphologically transparency support significantly affects lexical inferencingsuccess and the contextual support has less effect on lexical inferencing. Thefindings of this research are discussed in light of previous studies, and there aresome pedagogical implications have been suggested.